Parcel shipping has grown to become an important mode of transportation and the industry continues to grow as enterprises and other shippers seek an increasing range of services from carriers to fulfill market requirements. By way of example, enterprises seek carriers that are able to integrate their transportation planning and execution processes, implement business rules easily, manage their business processes in exception mode(s), track their shipping execution, and complete the loop with easy financial settlement. In addition, carriers are attempting to distinguish themselves by offering a wide array of value added services, such as track & trace features and address validation.
Current ERP systems have only a limited capability to integrate with the carrier offerings, as well as fulfill the market requirements listed above. In general, ERP systems are integrated information systems that help enterprises better control their assets and business processes by creating adaptive systems that improve internal and external operations and enhance collaboration with constituents, customers, and suppliers. One example of an ERP system is the mySAP™ ERP solution provided by SAP AG of Walldorf, Germany.
An ERP system may comprise individual modules or software applications that provide support of enterprise key areas, such as financial management, human capital management, product development and manufacturing, and sales and service. As these modules are enterprise wide, to improve efficiency of operation and integration of these modules, an ERP system may utilize a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). SOA refers to a software architectural concept that encourages the creation of loosely coupled services that communicate and pass information between the modules. Specific examples of these loosely coupled services are Web services.
A Web service represents a self-contained, self-describing piece of application functionality that can be found and accessed by other applications using open standards. A Web service is self-contained, because the application using the Web service does not have to depend on anything other than the service itself, and self-describing, because all the information on how to use the service may be obtained from the service itself. The descriptions are centrally stored and accessible through Web-standards-based mechanisms to all applications that would like to invoke the service. Individual Web services may be further aggregated together to compose enterprise services. Enterprise services, as opposed to individual Web services, which are granular in nature, provide more meaningful building blocks for the task of automating enterprise-scale business scenarios. An enterprise-scale business scenario is a collection of related process steps that produce a specific outcome for a particular customer.
For example, a typical enterprise-scale business scenario is the order-to-cash process. An ERP system may include modules for each order-to-cash process step, such as sales order, billing, delivery, picking/packing, shipment, and invoice. Although carriers do offer a wide range of software products to support the above process steps, present ERP systems lack the ability to provide true integration of these software products. Rather, a carrier's complete service portfolio may only be accessed by an enterprise through a manual call of the carrier's website. For example, in the order-to-cash process, many carriers offer an address validation software product. Address validation ensures that customer entered shipping addresses are correct at the time of order processing. However, instead of fully integrating such carrier services, present ERP systems may only provide limited possibilities to store, for example, carrier rates and services for specific routing codes within data tables. Further, because of market factors such as fuel charges, rates are fairly dynamic. In addition, as the transportation market becomes more and more competitive, carriers have been forced to expand their service offerings on an on-going basis. The underlying result is that customers are forced to manually update these tables, or program their own update mechanisms.
The inability to integrate the service portfolio fully into an enterprise's systems limits the competitive position of many carriers. Further, manual corrections at the distribution center of the carrier resulting from old documentation or incorrect data at the enterprise, adds a lot of additional cost and jeopardizes the timely parcel delivery. Thus, as the carrier and enterprise solutions are non-integrated, the process of updating, testing, and integrating new carrier products is very time consuming and cumbersome. To react quickly to changes in the shipping markets, carriers and enterprises need a solution that will enable them to react instantly to market demands and a solution that offers easier update and integration mechanisms.
Accordingly, there is a need for a solution that integrates carrier services with the services and/or processes of an enterprise. For example, it would be beneficial to provide an integration platform that could eliminate cumbersome manual table entries and customizing. With this type of service-oriented solution, enterprises would be able to combine enterprise services with carrier services to facilitate end-to-end business processes to execute their transportation needs through carriers. Further, it would be beneficial to provide a platform that enables a Web service call from, for example, several points in the order-to-cash process to, for example, directly send relevant parameters and receive the most up to date services available. Moreover, with an enhanced integration of carrier and shipper services, manual efforts and shipping errors could be minimized.